


skybound

by o666666



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Movie: The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), tw: abortion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25767772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/o666666/pseuds/o666666
Summary: She could not imagine another child, what it might look like, its little curls and hooded eyes. She could not imagine explaining herself to William.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 1
Kudos: 37





	skybound

**Author's Note:**

> Based on an ask about my headcanons for a 2nd pregnancy happening during IWTB. Big thanks to @spookydarlablack.

A self-administered blood test in the hospital supply closet confirmed it. She was careless. She should have been careful. Didn’t it know, whatever it was, that she was hostile inside?

-

She wasn’t going to tell him. She couldn’t. After all the darkness would always return, or he would return to it; after all there was some meridian he could never cross, though perhaps she could straddle two worlds if she did not look back to make sure he followed her. It was why they couldn’t be together, so he said.

-

There was a yolk sack inside of a gestational sack and an embryo inside that, the size of a pen dot, barely beginning to accumulate the cells that would become heart and central nervous system and placenta.

There were two pills. One to block the hormones and the other to pass the pregnancy.

If things were different she could have it. If fate was ever in her favor. If she could keep the world at bay, protect a home, keep something sacred. She knew better. Nothing remained untouched.

But a day passed, then another and another. The pills remained in her medical bag where Mulder wouldn’t see them. The embryo began to curl up like a caterpillar. Part of powerlessness was discomfort with power.

What if it was a mistake? What if Mulder could convince her it was a mistake? She regretted nothing more than separating from William. There was some little sailor inside her who saw Mulder as a well of hope, port in the storm.

And what if he left her?

After all she wouldn’t be able to hide it. She would bleed for weeks. After all she wouldn’t lie.

-

She had to tell him. It was too close to hurting him deliberately otherwise—to hurt him in the same way twice. An omniscient observer might suggest that Mulder abandoned William first, but Scully never thought so.

-

Then she passed out in the shower.

She came awake to Mulder kneeling over her on the bath mat, patting her cheeks. “Scully? Honey?”

She closed her eyes again. She would tell him, but not today. She would take care of it, but not today.

-

He figured her out.

For all her icy accolades she was never very good at playing things cool.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked, stroking the wet hair on her neck.

She was in her robe, a towel on her head, in bed. He’d made her drink a glass of water.

“No,” she said.

He held her. “But there is something?”

He was profiling her for once, deducing. Usually he abstained from doing so. Her truths were painful to see.

She’d stopped taking her sleeping pill. He’d noticed. Damn whatever it was, perched in her soul, that wanted what it couldn’t have.

She shrugged. He knew.

“How long?”

Had she lied to him?

“I don’t know.” She was numb all over. She felt nothing, not the slightest emotional register. She wouldn’t have another child, she wouldn’t.

“I can’t do it, Mulder,” she told the wall, faced away from him, a whisper.

After Mulder’s death, after William, after running, each day she learned new ways in which her beliefs had evacuated her. Who was she to posture. She had no convictions. There was not a right decision or a wrong one, there were no miracles. The world was what it was. From some deep, anesthetized place inside her she began to cry.

“Okay,” he allowed her, kissing her temple. “Okay. It’s alright.”

“I have the pills,” she admitted. “For a medication abortion. I just need to take them.”

Mulder thumbed a knot in his neck, processing. “Okay.” His hand on her waist. A squeeze. He tried hard to be gentle with her. He remembered to be kinder to herself than she was. And he knew her. There had been a sea change in her those years they were forced apart; there were events from which she had never recovered. “But we could have a baby.”

There was a note of optimism in it, like he imagined fuzzy heads and milk breath and chubby hands on his cheeks. The hypothetical disgusted her.

“No,” Scully said. “I have a baby.”

-

He’d had long eyelashes. Loved sweet potato. Wiggled in his crib when she entered the room. Mulder knew these things from the slow drip of her retellings across years, across states, but would never experience them as recognition. Not the warm, sack-of-flour weight of William in his arms. Who was any other child to win him as a father. Who was Mulder to father someone else.

-

Later Mulder found her on the porch. There were crickets. The baby—if there was a baby—would be born in spring again.

“We’re a good family, Scully.” He looked out at the yard.

She thought the empirical data suggested otherwise. It was bad enough that they had their own happiness, stowed away between them among grief after grief. They had not done right by the boy once known as the final Mulder. There was desolation in his wake.

A frog croaked somewhere in the grass. Mulder chewed his cheek. “I think a lot about… what I would tell him,” he said.

Scully raised an eyebrow.

“I think about if I saw him on the street, if he was a man. How I’d want him to know that I would do things differently. How I know I learned my lesson at his expense. And it wasn’t your fault.”

He could see the pit at her center.

“I don’t think he’d hate you for it.” Mulder was low-voiced as he sat next to her, arms around her on the swing.

She averted her eyes. “Do you?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Scully.” This, not once believed, remained vital to the record.

Then it was her own resentment that worried her.

She and Mulder had been a team. They _were_ a team. But once it had been her and William.

He read her mind. “Can you ever forgive me?”

Perhaps it’d be the end of her; she’d always have faith in him. When Mulder fell, he rose like the sun.

“We would have responsibilities,” she hedged. It was the first moment since she learned she was pregnant that she even considered this—what it would look like. A future.

“I know.” He did.

She picked a string on the hem of her pajama pants. “It doesn’t feel right.”

A child—a _hypothetical_ child—was not their emotional experiment. They’d had their chance.

“You don’t have to do it again,” Mulder promised her. “But if you need to hear it, you could.”

When she looked at him, looking back, she could see that after all of it he held her faithfully, with William’s eyes. Like he believed her incapable of hurt. It was the old any-club-that’d-have-me conundrum of their running days—that he could trust her.

She put her head on his shoulder. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay.” He laid his head on hers. “Did you know crocodiles can’t die?”

“ _What?_ ”

“They’re killed environmentally,” Mulder explained. “But they never age out and die.”

-

When they finally slept she dreamed of him like every night, crying behind a door she couldn’t reach. She screamed, but she knew he couldn’t hear that she was coming. For all she knew, he thought she wasn’t.

He’d been an under-socialized baby, distrustful of strangers by osmosis, through her. He’d loved Monica and John and her mother and cried for everyone else. She had handed him to the social worker with great diplomacy, cooing and tucking his stuffed lamb under his neck, waving him off with a smile so as not to frighten to him, _I love you so much!_ , and sinking into dry gasps as soon as he turned out of the front door and his absence became real—

She could not imagine another child, what it might look like, its little curls and hooded eyes. She couldn’t imagine it walking or talking or loving her in a way she could accept. She could not imagine it beyond nine months; she and a child were incompatible. She could not imagine explaining herself to William. It made her sick to want it. It was betrayal.

-

But more days passed, and there was less time. They spoke around it until they couldn’t.

“Just do me one favor,” Mulder told her. At first she didn’t want to hear it and paced around the kitchen.

She took the oats down from the cabinet but Mulder took them out of her hand and put them back.

“Look at me.”

Scully looked.

“Let’s sit down.”

She rolled her eyes but sat across from him at the table.

“Scully,” he began. “I have to wonder why you haven’t done it already. If you really want to do it.” He took her hand. “And I want to remind you you’re not alone in this.”

She pulled it away. “You are _therapizing_ me, Mulder, this is—”

“This is your decision. One hundred percent.”

She glowered. She hated to be patronized.

“But answer me this.”

They looked at each other. She seemed so sure. But Mulder knew her loyalty always led her into trouble—deprivation, even. Maybe something in her wanted to be contradicted, maybe—like all the times before when he hadn’t recognized it, the placental abruption when she was pregnant the first time, his flight to New Mexico—this was his chance to protect her from proving that she could handle something on her own.

“Answer me this,” he continued, “and I will take you on that trip to the Bahamas. I will quit the FBI and take you next week.”

Her eyes were wide.

“Are you doing it because you hate yourself?”

She scoffed.

“Because I don’t think that’s a good reason to do it, Scully.” He pressed at the headache behind his eyes. “I don’t. And if you confided in me because you want me to stop you from making the same mistake twice, I don’t want to make the same mistake again either.”

She wasn’t crying, but her eyes weren’t dry. “My final act to him was a lie, Mulder,” she said.

He hung his head in his hands. “ _Scully_.”

“He thought he’d see me again, I _know_ he did, but it was a lie. The last thing I ever did as a mother. I _hurt_ him.”

“You were hurt.” Another note on the record—Scully’d had three concussions in the first year of William’s life.

“He trusted me,” she whispered. The innocence in his eyes as he departed had been the worst of all. He’d thought he was coming back.

“And I will never put you in that position again.”

She opened her mouth to remind him he couldn’t promise that—she wouldn’t make him.

“I meant what I said,” he told her. Leaving the FBI. New priorities. “It’d be the two of us.”

“ _Mulder_.” She trembled all over. It was a rare love, she recognized, when someone persisted insofar as to tell her what she needed to hear when she needed to hear it.

“You don’t owe him your misery.” His voice carried her. “You don’t.”

At some point they had clasped their hands together, all of them, like a prayer. He squeezed. “Maybe what we do owe him is to do it better this time.”

Maybe.

-

She was belly-up in the ocean. A flock of warblers passed overhead.

Laura and Robert Petrie had honeymooned at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas like Elvis and Priscilla sometime in 2003, but Scully favored the tropics.

She heard splashing near and lifted her head to shake the water out.

“Hey, Starbuck.” Mulder stood ankle-deep behind her, dragging a wide canoe.

“Are you gonna paddle that?”

He flexed his muscles at her expression of skepticism. “Ready to go?”

She was.


End file.
